Ardor and Abandonment in the Animal Pack

Beetle and ant larvae are all that’s for dinner as the beloved documentary series “Meerkat Manor” resumes tonight on Animal Planet. In the dry season, the female meerkats aren’t lactating. Baby Attila, only two inches tall, is playing too rough with his younger sister, Mango; he’s hyperaggressive (we’re told) because he’s so hungry. Maybe. Or maybe it’s because someone named him Attila.

But let’s table, for now, the problems of anthropomorphism. Here in Meerkat Manor the conversion of meerkats to people for storytelling purposes is so complete, and so entertaining, that resistance is futile.

“Meerkat Manor” has won fans for its close-ups of expressive meerkats and sweeping shots of their scrubby South African habitat and its broad bluebird-blue sky. But what clinches its status as first-rate nature television are its tales of animal-pack dynamics, the kind that send evolutionary-psych types into rapturous just-so stories about how human romantic tensions and office politics came to be.

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Two statuesque stars of Animal Planets reality series Meerkat Manor.Credit
John Brown/Animal Planet

There is an alpha female, Flower, and an alpha male, Zaphod, who has sole mating rights with her. Youssarian, Zaphod’s brother, is the displaced macher meerkat, scheming about a comeback; he used to be a big deal until Zaphod displaced him. But now he again has to be kept in check, lest he make a run on Flower. Ha — just like that relationship in your dorm between Abby, Clyde and Boz, right?

That’s the initial pleasure of “Meerkat Manor”: finding parallels with human life. But soon the comparisons don’t matter anymore: the alert little meerkats become engaging as themselves, and not merely as doppelgängers for humans. The narration, warmly delivered by the good-guy actor Sean Astin, also builds suspense and sympathy in a wonderfully unstrained way.

But what if Youssarian joins the enemy clique, the Lazuli, by first scoring with Pancake, a recent refugee from that fearsome gang? (Nicks on her face indicate that she’s ungroomed and therefore solo.) That would show Zaphod, smug fat cat that he is. So Youssarian has sex with Pancake. But in the bright light of day, he recognizes her for what she is — a “lone, evicted female,” says Mr. Astin. “Although he likes Pancake,” Mr. Astin continues, about Youssarian, “she isn’t the only dish on the Kalahari menu.” Thus he bounds off, the rogue, looking for a higher-status Lazuli, “leaving her once again abandoned to a life of solitude.”